Change your passwords

I’ve written this post for the non-technical people I do “tech support” for.

Do you use the same password on different websites? Or, the same password with slight variations (for example secret-abc on website abc.com and secret-xyz on website xyz.com). Or, do you make your password “secure” (it’s not) by changing one of the letters for a number or symbol (eg secret becomes s3cret, password becomes p@ssword).

Why not? Hackers (crackers) are regularly breaking into public websites (recently LinkedIn, Last.Fm, Sony, Facebook) and stealing the encrypted password database. Unfortunately, due to computers getting faster and programming errors, hackers are easily “reverse engineer” these passwords, especially if you’ve used a word that appears in a dictionary (any dictionary – English, a foreign language, a slang word).

Well why is that a problem? Let’s imagine you are Fred Smith and you have a username/password fredsmith and s3cret on a website. A hacker breaks into this website, steals all the encrypted passwords. After about 6 hours they’ve cracked your password as it’s based on a dictionary word. The hacker will then automatically try this username/password (and variations) against lots of other websites. Your username/password on Facebook is fsmith and s3cret – account stolen. Your username/password on Hotmail is fredsmith and secret! – account stolen. Etc, etc.

So what do I do?

Two steps:

use good passwords generated by a password generator or tool

store your passwords in some sort of “password vault”, and protect that vault really well

Using a password generator

Generating good passwords is hard – you need to make sure they contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and are long. But you want them to be easy to remember. You can take the first letters of a song or saying and convert it into a password (for example Sydney rains all the time I’m tired of getting wet becomes SrattItogw). But that’s hard work too – all those different websites to generate passwords for!